Children's burial ground, Brackaharagh, Co. Kerry

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Brackaharagh, Co. Kerry

On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a roughly oval patch of ground rises about two metres above the surrounding pasture, its interior surface lumpy with low, sod-covered mounds and a scattering of upright grave-markers.

The enclosing wall has been almost entirely swallowed by vegetation, though its upper courses show signs of partial rebuilding at some point in recent times. This is a calluragh, a children's burial ground, one of hundreds scattered across Ireland where unbaptised infants were interred in consecrated-adjacent but theologically marginal ground.

Calluraghs, sometimes also called cillíní, occupy a particular and melancholy corner of Irish social and religious history. Catholic doctrine long held that unbaptised children could not be buried in consecrated parish ground, leaving families to inter them instead in liminal spaces: old ringforts, ancient enclosures, clifftops, or sites like this one at Brackaharagh, overlooking Cove Harbour to the east. The practice continued well into the twentieth century in many parts of rural Ireland. This site survives as an oval enclosure measuring roughly 27 metres north to south and 22.6 metres east to west, and whatever precise history of use it holds is now largely unreadable beneath the overgrowth. It is worth noting that the site was plotted incorrectly on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map, a small cartographic error that was corrected by the time the second edition was published, suggesting the place was known and considered worth recording accurately, even if its occupants were those whom official religion had placed beyond the ordinary rites of burial.

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